Remember Psycho, the loveable character from Crysis? Me either. I mainly remember my frame rate during the horrible final battle on the aircraft carrier. Oh, and I remember the cliffhanger non-ending. I also remember the terrible Harrier jet sequence. Those are the things that really stuck with me. The developers gave me about ten or twelve hours of a really cool shooter and then knocked it out of my head with a heavy dose of awful.

But apparently, Psycho was loveable enough to get his own spin-off game. The press release from Electronic Arts carefully avoids calling Crysis Warhead anything other than a "parallel storyline", which says to me they're not ballsy enough to call it a sequel or forthright enough to call it an expansion pack. You're just going to be on another part of the island while the same stuff goes on. It's like the "tailies" episodes of Lost.

There are the usual bullet points, including "a new, enhanced and optimized version", "an even bigger arsenal of fully customizable weapons and new vehicles", and "new multplayer content". Perhaps the most interesting bit is that German developer Crytek has created a whole new studio in Budapest. I'm guessing this "parallel storyline" is a way to get them running smoothly before they move on to something bigger.